


.-.. .. ..-. . / --. --- . ... / --- -.

by EmeraldTulip



Series: Curiosity Voyage [9]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Loss of Powers, One Shot, Post-Canon, Step-Siblings Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Step-siblings, joint powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 13:28:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20009050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldTulip/pseuds/EmeraldTulip
Summary: This new place is not Hawkins.





	.-.. .. ..-. . / --. --- . ... / --- -.

**Author's Note:**

> drabble thing I wrote shortly after season 3. set a year post-canon.  
> enjoy!

This new place is not Hawkins.

The people are louder, much more friendly, less mysterious. It’s exactly the kind of town Mike would hate.

El loves it.

For once, there are people around her who don’t know where she really came from. These people don’t know anything about her past. They treat her like she’s _normal_.

Not that Will, Joyce, and Jonathan don’t, of course. They’ve adopted her into their family as easily as she breathes. But they do know what her life used to be like, and that’s different. Joyce knew Hop. Jonathan’s seen the lab. Will…

Well. El does love the normalcy of her new home, but Will will always be her lifeline.

* * *

After all this time, El still calls Max her best friend. They talk every week, sometimes with Lucas joining in, and they just _laugh_. They tell her about Hawkins, and she tells them about school, and _dates_ , and anything new at home.

( _Home_ —this place is home, now. Not Hawkins. It has been for a long time.)

She calls Mike every now and then, at least once a month for a year. After that first year, the calls become a bit more sparse.

They’re still friends. But El knows that she is far too distant from him now—literally and emotionally. She doesn’t regret kissing him, more than a year ago, because she knows now that it was goodbye. But she’s different now. So is he. And that’s okay.

* * *

That thought solidifies a year and a half after everything, when El comes home to hear Will talking to someone either on the phone or the radio.

She pays it little mind, because some of Will’s new friends are very chatty, and if it’s not them then Dustin often radios in. Instead, she rummages around in the kitchen to find a snack, only paying attention to Will’s conversation when he says her name.

“… just heard El walk in, do you want to talk to her?” He only pauses for a moment, and his next words are tinged with surprise. “Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll talk to you later, then?”

He walks into the kitchen a minute later, stealing a bite of El’s peanut buttered toast.

“Who was that?” she asks.

Will quickly glances at her, as though gauging a reaction she hasn’t yet had. “Mike.” He takes a faux-nonchalant sip of water, and El can see the conflict in his eyes. “He says hi.” His fingers absently tap on the counter, and El doesn’t even think that he knows what message he’s sending.

It’s morse code, a signal that El and Will have developed to tap out to each other. Just to get through the rough times—the dreary school days, the bad phone calls, the frustrating shopkeepers.

It’s a code that El chanted to herself on all the days she missed Mike—a code that she knows that Will is repeating now, for exactly the same reason.

.-.. .. ..-. . / --. --- . ... / --- -.

 _Yeah,_ El thinks. _Life goes on._

* * *

She wakes with a gasp, clutching her pillow to her chest.

“El,” Will murmurs, rolling over on the floor, sleepily peering up at her. He’d been working on math with her before they had fallen asleep. “What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t ask, _are you okay_ , because Will knows her better than anyone at this point. He knows she’s not, even if what rattled her is just a normal nightmare. But he wants to help, the same way she does for him.

Right now, though, she can’t speak. She’ll tell him in the morning.

So she just shakes her head slowly, seeking out his eyes in the dark until she finds them. Green pierces through the darkness to her face, and El finds comfort in the fact that her brother—her _brother_ —knows exactly what she means. Knows exactly what she needs. She reaches out.

Will grasps her hand. “It’s okay.”

She squeezes their fingers tighter, and then there’s a flash of black.

* * *

“Something you did made them come back,” El insists, pacing the room. “Just for a second. I thought I imagined it, but then my dream…”

Will shrugs helplessly. “El, I really don’t know. I believe you saw something, but I didn’t do _anything_ that would activate your powers.”

“But you _did_ ,” she says. “I don’t know how, but for a second, I thought I saw the In-Between. And then, later, I thought I saw…” She trails off, because too late she’s realized that she shouldn’t give false hope.

But Will knows her. “You thought you saw him.”

They both know who _him_ is.

El bites her cheek. “We need to figure this out,” she tells him, and she knows he agrees.

* * *

(Sometimes, he feels her presence around him, but it’s hazy and far away. She reaches out blindly, and he tries to grasp her hand, but it never works.

The men come for him regularly—there is no day and night anymore, but he knows that they abide by a schedule.

But no matter how often they torture him, how brutally they beat him, how angrily they yell, he retains one thing:

“I need to get back to my daughter.”)

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are, as always, appreciated.  
> find me on tumblr, my main is [@perseusjaxon](https://perseusjaxon.tumblr.com) and my writing blog is [@lowriting](https://lowriting.tumblr.com)!


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